Page 97 - China's Renaissance in Bronze, The Robert H.CIague Collection of Later Chinese Bronzes 1100-1900

A recently published gu/-shaped censer with the six-character mark
of Hu Wenming attests to the production of cast bronzes with inlays in
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both silver wire and sheet gold and silver in the late Ming; similar though
not identical in style, the Hu Wenming censer supports the attribution of
the Clague piece to the seventeenth century. Should information ever come
to light that confirms the authenticity of the Shisou mark on the Clague
censer, the relationship of the piece to a marked Hu Wenming censer will
assist in establishing Shisou's period of activity.
Without hard evidence - even basic information about his dates of
activity and the characteristics of his style - attributions to Shisou's hand
cannot seriously be considered; the term 'Shisou manner,' however, can
meaningfully be used as a generic term to designate those later bronze
studio implements with fine-line decoration inlaid in silver wire.
The collection of the National Palace Museum, Taipei, includes a
Qianlong-period porcelain censer with cabriole legs and with a bowl iden-
tical in shape to that of the Clague censer, the piece entirely covered with
a mottled rust-brown glaze imitating bronze. 20 Pyrotechnical displays of
skill, such trompe I'oeil ceramics were made in imitation of a variety of
materials - jade, marble, bronze, lacquer, and wood, to name but a few - in
the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries merely to delight and to amuse.
Intended for the palace, such imperially marked Qianlong-period ceramics
were typically modeled on earlier pieces rather than upon contemporaneous
ones, indicating that the form of the Clague censer was considered 'old'
by the eighteenth century. The model for the censer might have been a
Xuande bronze, though it might also have been a late Ming or early Qing
imitation, like the present piece, mistaken for an original. The porcelain
censer has animal-head handles at either side, like one pictured in Xuande
yiqi tupu, confirming the relationship to Xuande bronzes; significantly, it also
has a wide, unornamented ring encircling the periphery of the base.

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